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Contributing

All contributions are welcome, from the tiniest typo to a brand new article. Translations in all languages are welcome (or, for that matter, original articles in any language). Send a pull request or open an issue any time of day or night.

Please prepend the tag [language/lang-code] to your issues and pull requests. For example, [python/en] for English Python. This will help everyone pick out things they care about.

We're happy for any contribution in any form, but if you're making more than one major change (i.e. translations for two different languages) it would be super cool of you to make a separate pull request for each one so that someone can review them more effectively and/or individually.

Style Guidelines

  • Keep lines under 80 chars
    • Try to keep line length in code blocks to 80 characters or fewer.
    • Otherwise, the text will overflow and look odd.
    • This and other potential pitfalls to format the content consistently are identified by the freely available markdownlint.
  • Prefer example to exposition
    • Try to use as few words as possible.
    • Code examples are preferred over exposition in all cases.
  • Eschew surplusage
    • We welcome newcomers, but the target audience for this site is programmers with some experience.
    • Try to avoid explaining basic concepts except for those specific to the language in question.
    • Keep articles succinct and scannable. We all know how to use Google here.
  • Use UTF-8
    • For translations (or EN articles with non-ASCII characters) please ensure your file is UTF-8 encoded.
    • Leave out the byte-order-mark (BOM) at the start of the file (in Vim, use :set nobomb).
    • You can check if the file contains a BOM on Linux/Unix systems by running file language.html.markdown You will see this if it uses a BOM: UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM) text.

Header configuration

The actual site uses Middleman to generate HTML files from these Markdown ones. Middleman, or at least the custom scripts underpinning the site, requires that some key information be defined in the header.

The following fields are necessary for English articles about programming languages:

  • language The programming language in question
  • contributors A list of [author, URL] lists to credit

Other fields:

  • category: The category of the article. So far, can be one of language, tool or Algorithms & Data Structures. Defaults to language if omitted.
  • filename: The filename for this article's code. It will be fetched, mashed together, and made downloadable.
    • For non-English articles, filename should have a language-specific suffix.
  • lang: For translations, the human language this article is in. For categorization, mostly.

Here's an example header for an Esperanto translation of Ruby:

*--
language: ruby
filename: learnruby-epo.ruby
contributors:
    - ["Doktor Esperanto", "http://example.com/"]
    - ["Someone else", "http://someoneelseswebsite.com/"]
lang: ep-ep
*--

Syntax highlighter

Pygments is used for syntax highlighting through pygments.rb.

Should I add myself as a contributor?

If you want to add yourself to contributors, keep in mind that contributors get equal billing, and the first contributor usually wrote the whole article. Please use your judgment when deciding if your contribution constitutes a substantial addition or not.

Building the site locally

You can build the site locally to test your changes. Follow the steps below.

  • Install Ruby language runtime and RubyGems. See here for more details.
  • Clone or zip download the learnxinyminutes-site repository.
    • git clone https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes-site
  • Install Middleman and other required dependencies using Bundler.
    • cd learnxinyminutes-site/
    • bundle install
  • Get the source in place
    • Copy the contents of your clone of the fork of learnxinyminutes-docs repo into the source/docs folder. There shouldn't be a learnxinyminutes-docs folder inside the docs folder, it should just contain all the repo contents.
    • Checkout your fork of the learnxinyminutes-docs repo as source/docs.
      • cd source/docs/
      • git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/learnxinyminutes-docs ./source/docs/
  • Build the site or run a development server to test your changes (NOTE: run these commands at learnxinyminutes-site/).
    • Build - bundle exec middleman build
    • Dev server - bundle exec middleman --force-polling --verbose